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The intelligence officials have found that Moscow’s agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. “They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by — they do that just as much as anybody else does,” says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.)

In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence.

It is worth noting that it’s possible, even easy, to overstate how effective these campaigns are, and one of the big, undiscussed, flaws here is that we know the Russian government was behind it. In the end, Trump’s victory was a squeaker, and he soundly lost the popular vote, something that still nettles him. Really, propaganda campaigns only work if we don’t think critically and unblinkingly accept what they say. A little common sense, and fact-checking, goes a long way.